These aren’t PCWorld’s formal picks—they’re the opinions of the Full Nerd podcast group alone. We didn’t hold staff-wide meetings or create elaborate Excel spreadsheets full of information about every gizmo reviewed in 2017. Instead, each member of the Full Nerd crew walked into the studio armed with their personal lists of the best hardware in each category, ready to cajole and convince the others to their cause. No one leaves until we’ve named every winner. And in the cases where we couldn’t break a deadlock, we turned to the live audience as the tiebreaker.

In this week’s The Full Nerd, Gordon Mah Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Dan Masaoka talk about the release of AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 56, and how the Radeon RX Vega lineup compares against Nvidia’s GeForce cards. It doesn’t really matter for the GTX 1070 or Radeon RX Vega 56, since you can’t buy either at anywhere near suggested pricing, so we dive into Radeon Vega 64 vs. GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti as well.

In this week’s The Full Nerd, Gordon Mah Ung, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Adam Patrick Murray talk about this week’s hot topic: AMD’s long-awaited Radeon RX Vega reveal. You can check out our Radeon RX Vega launch coverage for the raw speeds and feeds details, but we dive in-depth in the video above, because live viewers of the show sure had a lot of questions. How does performance compare to GeForce cards? When will Radeon RX Vega cards launch? What’s up with these “Radeon packs,” anyway? The answers lie within.

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The gang also talks about the mysterious extra chips lurking inside AMD’s Threadripper processors, with Gordon bringing the inside scoop from a source in the know. Threadripper’s premium packaging sparks a chat about how hardware boxes could learn a lot from birthday cards. Then we break open those boxes and compare Intel’s stock CPU coolers against AMD’s Wraith coolers. As always, we wrap thing ups by answering several questions straight from you.